TidWeb: A Tiddlywiki Browser for Android

#1

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This week I’ve been toying around with learning how to build android apps and, of course, my natural starting point was TiddlyWiki.

Why? Well, I’ve been very happy with accessing my server’s tiddlywiki instances via browser, however there are some disadvantages:

  1. The browser (in my experience) becomes bloated with tabs quite quickly

  2. Switching between multiple MWS wikis is not entirely natural via android-chrome’s tab system

  3. Browsers dont run as naturally and feel cluttered on my flip-phone’s front screen – and I can only run apps from there, I cannot have a launcher that routes directly to any wiki.

  4. Browsers are surprisingly restrictive about the media controls that they display, which has been an annoying issue as I have continued to toy around with using TW for playing media.

Therefore, I’ve worked up a little app I call TidWeb or Tiddlywiki Browser

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After adding one or more wikis, they appear on the bottom bar, as such:

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This allows for one to switch easily between wikis, though it caches the other wikis to allow for rapid switching

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Am currently working on the audio controls, seeing what kinds of interactions are possible and trying to perfect the behavior of the notification tray.

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It’s been a real fun and educational project so far :slight_smile: My actual suggestion to anyone who has been thinking along these lines is to go ahead and try to build your own app, though if anyone’s interested in playing with it, the experimental APK can be found here .

And suggestions/ideas for what you’d include on your own custom app are always welcome, of course.

4 Likes
#2

Any possibility of using the share option in android to send contents to the wiki easily (and create tiddlers based on certain templates). Also can local wikis be added to this app ?

#3

Fantastic idea! I’ve had that problem before, and vice versa, actually, wanting to send something directly to TW. Will investigate

1 Like
#4

I’m not sure, I haven’t tried it – if you can access local files through a browser, you can probably access through this.

I might have a look at that, I don’t currently keep many local wikis myself.

#5

Yes, it’s possible:

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That being the title, the tiddler text, and the wiki’s base url. Was pretty straightforward, will report on achieving the opposite (receiving share and making tiddler). This would be a huge improvement for my current process.

Edit:

Woops, that works too

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#6

Tat looks interesting. Is it possible to make it work with wikis saved in one drive or similar services.

Have you updated the GitHub repo to test it ?

#7

Will update later, but you should be able to test local and onedrive wikis on the version that’s uploaded.

If you get a “became unresponsive close/wait” just click wait, I need to do some memory cleanup at some point, but it’s not given me any problems so far other than the warning message.

Am curious, lmk.

EDIT:

For clarity, I did not update immediately because I’m trying to implement a “quick tag” system so that the user can select from a number of their own tags to apply on a case by case basis

#8

How to get the url for such wikis

I do the same for such messages

#9

I definitely do not know. If you figure out, post a solution?

However, the github page is updated with the version that allows for sharing to/from, if you’d like to try it :slight_smile:

Again, fantastic suggestion @arunnbabu81 , I welcome any other you or anyone else might have.

#10

Any chance you could post the source code and not just the generated APK?

#11

That is my plan, yes :slightly_smiling_face: consider this a live demo atm

PS, quick-tags is now active, and can be accessed from the drop-down.

Share-to doesn’t consistently change focus so you might need to switch to the app after hitting share – it should at that point let you pick from any of your wikis to add the share to

#12

Ok. I look forward to playing with it at that point! :wink:

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#13

I look forward to seeing what you can do with it :grin:

#14

I tried to use my tiddlyhost site for the share option…but its showing could not create a tiddler. Make sure the wiki is loaded

#15

I can replicate what you’re telling me (and also notice delete-wiki is broken, will fix in the morning), but cannot explain it without reflecting more, and perhaps knowing more about how Tiddlyhost works.

That message would occur any time the browser was unable to send a message to the wiki, for any reason.

EDIT:

Believe I’ve found the cause, it’s affecting my node wikis too – probably broke it when trying to refine the sharing-from process – will resolve and push fix :slight_smile:

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#16

Alright have fixed both issues (delete and receiving share) and have also confirmed that receiving share does not work with Tiddlyhost.

Perhaps @simon has implemented some policy which does not allow the wiki to receive messages from the browser?

tiddlywiki.wiki.addTiddler({
            title: title,
            text: processedText,
            tags: tags
        });
#17

I would consider whether it might be a timing issue, that is whether the wiki finishes loading before that code is executed.

#18

I had considered that, so in testing I made sure that I was logged in and could see the tiddlyhost wiki was loaded before triggering the message. I get the confirmation message that it was saved (which actually just means that the message was sent) but then am not finding the tiddler.

Moments later it tests fine on the node wiki though.

#19

@Scott_Sauyet, source code has been uploaded :slight_smile: